Fifty-six years ago, Allen was a favorite target of Syracuse University quarterback Wilmeth Sidat-Singh in a legendary SU win over Cornell.

If Singh is remembered at SU, it is for that feat. Every time SU has a big rally in football, tales of the Cornell game get dusted off. Yet Allen said Sidat-Singh's real legacy was forged beneath a hoop.

"He was the greatest athlete I ever saw in my whole life, and basketball was his game," Allen said.

"If Wilmeth had lived long enough, if he had played long enough, there is no telling how great he would have been," said William "Pop" Gates, the Hall of Famer who was among the first African-Americans to integrate modern pro basketball.

Sidat-Singh never got the chance. He was killed in a plane crash in 1943, at the age of 25. He had enlisted to serve with the famed Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black fighter squadron, and his plane went down over Lake Huron. He once had dreams of becoming a doctor, like his stepfather. But he was also a star on some of the greatest pro basketball teams of his era.

In 1939, when coaches were still uneasy about getting rid of the jump ball after every basket, Sidat-Singh was already a master of the no-look pass. His tongue often hung out of his mouth, in a fashion made famous five decades later. Sidat-Singh's contemporaries remember him for his tremendous court vision, for his explosive first step toward the basket, for his elusive grace when driving the lane.

"I've often thought he introduced a lot of moves you didn't see in those days," said the Rev. John Schroeder, a retired New Hampshire minister who was Sidat-Singh's teammate at SU. "He was a dandy ballhandler, really tricky."

Richard Jensen, Sidat-Singh's roommate on the road, put it more bluntly: "He could fake you right out of your jock."

Gates and Sidat-Singh were roommates on the New York Renaissance - perhaps the nation's best pro team - which played out of Harlem's storied Renaissance Casino. "He was a warm person, who had this ability to make anyone around him feel good," Gates said. "All those years, all the things he went through, and I don't think I ever saw him get really mad once."

Like so many SU basketball players who followed him - Dave Bing, Ernie Austin, Sherman Douglas and now Lawrence Moten - Sidat-Singh was raised in Washington, D.C. He was born there as Wilmeth Webb. But he changed his name when his mother, Pauline, married Dr. Samuel Sidat-Singh, a Harlem physician.

Sidat-Singh earned a reputation as a guy who excelled at any game he tried. Frankie Richards, 83, who helped manage the Rens, recalls how Sidat-Singh often played top-flight tennis against the best players in Harlem. "He could do everything," Richards said.

In 1935, Sidat-Singh, John Isaacs and Bill King were among the first African-Americans named first-team All-City for New York high school basketball. Sidat-Singh then went without a scholarship to study premed at Syracuse University, where his athletic brilliance soon won him a full ride.

On Feb. 1, 1939, Sidat-Singh was the undisputed star on the first Syracuse team to play in the old Madison Square Garden. Bothered by cramps, he scored only one point as the Orangemen defeated Manhattan, 42-31, before a crowd of 12,500. In the stands, less than a year before his death, was James Naismith, the inventor of the sport. Basketball's founder got a look at the game's stylistic future.

Life magazine called Sidat-Singh "the lad who might be the sensation of the year in basketball." He averaged about nine points a game as a senior with the Orange, making him top scorer on a 14-4 team. That was despite sitting out one game against the Naval Academy, which refused to take the court against a black man.

Sidat-Singh's social life at Syracuse faced similar obstacles. "He never really had an awful lot of fun with the rest of us," recalls Harry Horn of Rochester, an SU teammate. "During the off-season we liked to go out for a beer or two, but he couldn't go with us. And he always lived off-campus."

The reasons for that exclusion are obvious. Even the North retained elements of Jim Crow. SU took great pains to describe Sidat-Singh's background as "Indian" or "Hindu." That myth persists today. While Jensen said Sidat-Singh sometimes identified himself as Indian, old Rens teammate John Isaacs recalls it differently. "He never presented himself as anything except a black man from Harlem," Isaacs said.

Over the years, Sidat-Singh's basketball achievements have faded out in Orange lore. When he is recalled at SU, it is for being the first in an ongoing string of fine African-American quarterbacks. The story goes that he was "discovered" playing intramural football by assistants Bud Wilkinson and Roy Simmons Sr.

The town loved him. Reporters called him "the sepia sniper." His picture was used on advertisements for phonograph consoles. And his celebrity hit its peak when Sidat-Singh threw three fourth-quarter touchdown passes in the comeback win over Cornell, which won flowery accolades from sportswriter Grantland Rice.

Allen is haunted by the humiliation Sidat-Singh often endured. He remembers a group of football players walking in downtown Syracuse. They decided to stop for a few beers at the Hotel Syracuse, when Sidat-Singh politely declined. "I don't think I should go in there," he said. His friends immediately understood. This was not a place that would serve Wil Sidat-Singh.

Isaacs, now 79 years old, still plays pickup and works with kids at the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx. He looks more like a man in his mid-40s, and his manner alternates between charm and ferocity.

Nothing makes him more angry than some young player trying to wave off his advice.

Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, with the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II.Courtesy Kathleen Pascarella

"You see that iron ring?" Isaacs will shout, getting right in the kid's face. "It's always been there! You put the ball through it! And not in your wildest dreams do you think this game started with you!"

It started, he said, with artists like Wil Sidat-Singh.

Born in Panama, Isaacs played on the Renaissance team of 1939 that won the first world championship tournament in Chicago. Two years later, Sidat-Singh joined the team, following professional stints with the Syracuse Reds and the Rochester Seagrams.

That Rens squad, on which Sidat-Singh was a starter, again went to the championship showdown in Chicago. The only Rens loss was a 43-42 semifinal defeat to the Detroit Eagles, the eventual champions. Sidat-Singh had 11 points.

He fed passes to such legends as Isaacs, Gates, Tarzan Cooper and Dolly King. They carried on a fierce rivalry with the Harlem Globetrotters, who at that time played serious, top-level basketball. Long before the Knicks, the Rens reigned as the professional kings of New York.

"A sensation," said Al Cervi, a teammate of Sidat-Singh's on the Rochester Seagrams, and later a coach of the Syracuse Nats. "He was around 6-foot-tall, a good offensive player who could shoot with either hand. If he had lived, there's no telling how great he could have been."

After Sidat-Singh returned to Washington in the early 1940s, he helped organize a new professional team called the Bears. Featuring all the mainstays from the Rens, the Bears would soon win another world championship - without the services of the ball-handler who helped put the team together.

He had enlisted as a pilot in an all-black squadron. During furloughs, Sidat-Singh still made it back to Harlem, where he'd hook up with his old teammates. Gates vividly remembers the last time he saw Sidat-Singh, in New York's Hotel Theresa on a spring night in '43. They had a few drinks and talked about where basketball might take them.

Sidat-Singh was 25 years old, a second lieutenant in the Air Corps. As an athlete, he was not yet in his prime. He could look ahead to perhaps another decade in basketball, which might have put him inside an integrated NBA. And anyone who saw him play says there's no doubt he would have made the Hall of Fame.

Instead, two weeks later, Wil Sidat-Singh was dead.

The engine of his single-seat pursuit plane caught fire while on a practice mission over Lake Huron. Sidat-Singh managed to parachute, but an eyewitness said he couldn't cut loose in the water. The chute dragged him down. That August, they finally recovered his body.

Not long ago, on a sunny day spent wandering through the Harlem streets of their youth, Isaacs and Gates recalled Sidat-Singh as young and ambitious, a confident symbol of much now gone from their lives. They both lament the way their old neighborhood has changed, the way a person must be wary once outside a twice-locked door.

But they were famous when those streets were alive with jazz and glamour, when a group of young ballplayers brought that style to their game. On a bright spring morning, standing beneath the crumbling walls of the boarded-up Renaissance Casino, the two men sighed while invoking Wil Sidat-Singh's name.